Thanks for the offer mate - very good of you. I've been looking at IB's book trader, and I think that's good enough for me. It seems sufficient to get an idea of DOM, and a feeling for what volumes will start hitting the next rungs in the ladder - I've been watching SPI and HSI, and it seems like one "should" be able to get away with roughly 5-10 contracts before a tick of slippage comes into play. Certainly on this volume, I don't expect to hit 3-levels very often.
What I want to know is though, if I submit a MKT order, and get uneven fill prices, can I be convinced that I "used up" all of the available DOM at a particular level, before I started getting filled at worse prices?
Some of the talk of HF algos has me paranoid. If e.g. I submit a large MKT order (say it covers 5-levels of the DOM), am I guaranteed that the market does not move during my fills? Do I get filled at exactly the numbers in the book that were present when my order hit the exchange? Or does some evil HF algo "see" a bunch of orders getting hit at MKT, and ramps the ask up during the the few microseconds taken to fill my orders??